FEBRUARY 9, 1998:
In the opening of Robert Duvall's new film The Apostle, a
sedan on a lonesome stretch of blacktop pulls to a halt near a cluster of
police cars and onlookers. A wrecked car sits silent in the weeds. The
sedan door opens, and a man bounds across the field to the scene of the
crash. He peers inside and finds a boy covered in blood. Leaning in, he
urges the passenger, Christian or no Christian, to use his dying breath to
offer his soul to God. His hand administers comfort; his leg kicks wildly
at the state trooper who would pull him away. Duty done, the man strides
back across the field like joy walking. "Mama," he crows to his beaming
mother, "we made news in Heaven this morning." The sedan pulls away.

All told, the scene takes only a few minutes. But how much Duvall
is able to accomplish! Right up front, he lets us know that his character,
a charismatic Pentecostal evangelist named Euliss "Sonny" Dewey, is a
prideful son-of-a-gun with a temper and an ugly streak of
self-righteousness. (Too bad if that passenger's a Buddhist.) He's also a
devout man, though, and the scene's remarkable coda shows his faith is
indeed capable of working miracles. The miracle is that The Apostle never
backs away from the contradictions in Sonny's character, or from the jumble
of moods and emotions in that first scene. What Duvall has created is the
most complex, and certainly the most entertaining, American movie ever made
about a flawed man of God.

Is Sonny a fake or a flake? Neither, exactly; but to Duvall's credit as
actor, writer, and director, he always leaves us wondering. Sonny leads a
thriving congregation in Texas, where he tours the revival circuit like a
big-name motivational speaker. Then comes the fall. Fed up with his
drinking, his womanizing, and his beatings, his wife Jessie (Farrah
Fawcett) strikes up an affair with a younger minister. They wrest away
control of his church. Sonny drinks; Sonny rails at his maker all hours of
the night. Sonny takes a baseball bat to the young minister's head. The man
of God is now a man on the run.

So Sonny throws himself once more in God's hands, and he buries his
identity, along with his car, in a pond. At this point, I hate to say more
about the plot, because so much of the film's pleasures lie in the casual
unfolding of the story and being swept along in Sonny's wake. Let's just
say that Duvall sends Sonny on a journey of redemption that isn't in the
least bit preachy or sickly sweet; that Barry Markowitz's cinematography
captures perfectly the sticky heat and dusty streets of the Deep South;
that Duvall envisions an integrated community that isn't a contradiction in
terms; and that he lingers over faces and locations that no big-budget
venture would give a second look. Sonny's America, a world of jackleg
revivals and small-town garages and one-room AM stations, is one we've
hardly ever seen at the movies. It even looks like someplace somebody might
actually live.

Sonny's flaws are serious and scary, and Duvall doesn't downplay them.
Throughout the movie, whenever Sonny does something noble, it's almost
always balanced by a twinge of self-preservation, hubris, or personal gain.
He can be cowardly--he won't visit his ailing mother (June Carter Cash at
her most angelic) because he's ducking the police--and even after he grants
himself a spiritual rebirth in a muddy creek, he's not above settling an
argument with his fists. Indeed, Duvall suggests his faith may only
reinforce his dangerous self-righteousness.

But in most movies, Sonny's failings as a human being would prove him a
scam artist: He'd be Elmer Gantry, or Steve Martin's slick-talking hustler
in Leap of Faith. Instead, Sonny's genuine spirituality coexists
uneasily with a hotheaded nature--the age-old war between mind and flesh.
If he were conning people, he wouldn't risk capture by building a new
congregation. If he were perfect, he'd have no need to seek or extol
redemption.

Duvall plays Sonny the preacher as a born entertainer, and,
refreshingly, he doesn't think that makes Sonny a hypocrite. The church I
attended as a kid was Baptist, not Pentecostal, but every year we waited to
see what the visiting revival preacher would have up his sleeve. One told
humorous sermon-length anecdotes; another passed out "Bible Bucks" with
Jesus' face on them. But nobody doubted the sincerity of their message; if
anything, people were grateful for the effort. Duvall spent years
researching the world of grassroots evangelism, and the early glimpses he
gives us of religion as traveling show are wonderful: a tent revival where
Sonny and a half-dozen preachers line up and trade off testimony like jazz
soloists; a bilingual Hispanic service where he demonstrates Jesus
reckoning Godzilla-style vengeance on "el Diablo."

The cast mixes non-professional and untrained actors with ringers like
Billy Bob Thornton and Miranda Richardson; among the many memorable
supporting players, Zelma Loyd as a parishioner, Rick Dial (the repair-shop
owner in Sling Blade) as a radio-station owner, and Billy Joe Shaver
as Sonny's loyal pal stand out. But the movie is Robert Duvall's triumph
from start to finish. As a send-off, he gives himself a 20-minute sermon
that's one rousing, resourceful piece of screen acting, an incantation of
fervor, fear, and regret that arcs like lightning. Sonny Dewey may not be
touched by divine inspiration, but his creator--well, that's another
story.

--Jim Ridley

Before and after

As literature, mysteries are strangely comforting. No matter how
high the body count, the guilty will most likely be punished, the innocent
saved in the nick of time, and the world restored to order. No such comfort
awaits in the profoundly disturbing The Sweet Hereafter, adapted for the
screen from Russell Banks' novel by Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Though
it has the elements of a procedural, The Sweet Hereafter is something much
more disquieting a mystery about the restoration of disorder--about the
way tragedy ruptures the routines and rituals that safeguard us against the
intrusion of chaos.

The investigator here is the agent of discord--a glib attorney, Mitchell
Stephens (Ian Holm), who seeks out the citizens of a small Canadian town
devastated by loss. On a slippery road, a school bus loaded with kids
plunged into a frozen lake; in an instant, the townspeople were robbed of
their children, their futures, and their illusions of security. Nothing
will bring back the kids, Stephens pitches to couple after grief-stricken
couple, but a huge class-action settlement will make somebody pay. Somebody
must pay. But who?

The first rule of order is to assess the blame. "There's no such thing
as an accident," the unflappable Stephens tells two "hippies" (Earl Pastko
and Arsine Khanjian) whose will to live seems to have died with their
adoptive son. But as the attorney pokes around the crash site, the suit
triggers a rift among the town's grieving parents. For if the crash wasn't
caused by negligence, it must have been cosmic retribution: for the hotel
owner (Alberta Watson) who was cheating on her husband with the local
mechanic (Bruce Greenwood); for the frustrated musician (Tom McCamus) who
was forcing his dreams--and perhaps himself--on his pop-singer daughter
(Sarah Polley).

The Sweet Hereafter is the most humane, and the most wrenching,
of Atom Egoyan's prickly, dark-humored movies. On the surface, the film
bears scant relation to Egoyan's ironic black comedies, whose clinical,
poker-faced acceptance of aberrant behavior resembles a David Lynch
quirkfest run through one of David Cronenberg's telepods. His most recent,
the fascinating but coolly remote Exotica, started with a kinky
situation--a bereaved father (again, Bruce Greenwood) obsessed with a
schoolgirl stripper--and worked its way backward to show how we'd misjudged
the motivations of everyone involved. But the director seemed more
interested in tweaking the audience's voyeuristic expectations than in
exploring the inner state of his characters.

In retrospect, the absurdist gamesmanship of those earlier movies was a
warm-up for The Sweet Hereafter's daringly fractured style and its
solemn, staggering depth of feeling. In its early scenes, The Sweet
Hereafter moves effortlessly back and forth in time, contrasting the
ravaged townspeople with their blissfully mundane lives before the crash.
"Before the crash"--the phrase comes to haunt every frame. We feel for the
bus driver (Gabrielle Rose) who chokes back tears in a room decorated with
school pictures; somehow, though, it's even more upsetting to see the
sweetly gawky woman exchanging banal pleasantries with smiling parents as
they usher their kids onto the bus. The movie's splintered chronology
ultimately removes everyone from the here and now--even Stephens, who
agonizes over a junkie daughter whose life he once literally held in his
hands. Grief erases the present tense; it leaves only a before and an
after.

Two sides of the man
Robert Duvall, finding redemption in The Apostle. Photo By Van Redin

In various forms, in all of his movies, Egoyan has examined the impact
of tragedy and the managing of loss. From the radiant first image, of a
sleeping couple cradling a little girl, The Sweet Hereafter is
suffused with a parent's anxious, consuming love for a child. (The use of
Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" as a suggestive refrain is
inspired.) But Egoyan gives us a terrible gift he spares his characters:
the knowledge of what is to come. We watch the town's placid routines of
daily life--the father who follows the school bus every day and waves to
his kids, the parents who insist on walking their boy to the bus
stop--knowing that the good-luck rituals will fail. When we see the
sleeping couple again, late in the film, we know what they'll awaken to.
The characters can't even retreat safely into memory--there are too many
guilty secrets, too much potential blame. When the lawsuit is resolved, in
a courtroom scene all the more gripping for its lack of theatrics, it
absolves no one.

The movie's icy calm is enhanced by Paul Sarossy's cinematography, which
emphasizes the town's isolation and the heavy expanses of snow, and by
Mychael Danna's serene madrigal strains on the soundtrack. As Stephens, Ian
Holm lends ambiguity and humanity to what could've been a stock shyster
role, and the supporting cast is wondrous, from Sarah Polley's quietly
accusing survivor to Bruce Greenwood's anguished father. And there are
countless moments of piercing beauty, culminating in a guilt-stricken look
of remembrance exchanged on a crowded street, years after the crash,
between two survivors who want nothing more than to forget. The Sweet
Hereafter offers no comfort, only the experience of its sorrowful
truths, and the emergence of a once promising filmmaker as a great one.

--Jim Ridley

Film epic

Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt is Godard for people who
don't like Godard. Its story of a would-be playwright hired by an American
producer to rewrite Homer's Odyssey for the screen is appealingly
self-referential, even postmodern--familiar territory for the Derrida
generation. The legendary French New Wave director keeps the experimental
techniques to a minimum a little film tinting here, a flash-forward
montage there. Fritz Lang appears as himself, Godard hovers in the
background as his assistant, and Jack Palance chews the scenery as the
despotic producer Prokosh (a stab at Godard's producer Joseph E.
Levine).

But Contempt is much more than a good-natured romp through studio
in-jokes. Framed by the giddy fun of the filmmaking scenes, a quieter,
deeper tale of abrogated responsibility, fading emotions, and fatal
indecision unfolds in a small Roman apartment. Writer Paul (Michel Piccoli)
insists to his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) that he is only
taking the Odyssey job to pay for their new digs and to make her
happy. But Camille's love for him turns to contempt when he knuckles under
to Prokosh at their first meeting, using the American's interest in his
wife as leverage for getting a job.

The tortuous thread of their marriage unravels slowly, over a single
half-hour scene at the heart of the film. Back and forth go their
arguments, like a lamp Paul turns on and off, like the wig that turns
Bardot's hair from blond to brunette at a whim. It's not until the third
act, on the Odyssey set in Capri, that we understand what draws Paul
to this material: Like Ulysses as interpreted by the screenwriter himself,
he prefers to push decisions off onto others, as if he's doing them a
favor, and then call the results "fate." If the viewer reads this back into
the apartment scene, the movie transcends its navel-gazing obsession with
movies and becomes as universal as Homer's epic.

Certainly among Godard's most accessible films, Contempt features
Bardot's most famous performance, as a wife who consents to be used because
her reliance on her husband--who plucked her out of the typing pool--is
absolute. Fans of Lang will enjoy his offhand remarks about his own career
("Personally, I prefer M"), especially as a world-weary European
foil to Prokosh's delusions of grandeur. And Palance hits exactly the right
note, with hilarious and tragic effect, as the ugly American who aims to
improve on Homer and German expressionism.

The 1997 restoration and rerelease of Contempt also demonstrates
with fresh vigor Godard's way with color. Utilizing a unified palette that
ranges from the ancient daylight of Rome to the cerulean blue of the
Mediterranean to the lipstick-red sofa in Paul and Camille's modernist
apartment, the director views Europe as a place where technology and style
have changed nothing important in human nature since the dawn of time.
Contempt may be a lark when compared to Godard's more challenging
works, but it still plumbs depths unknown to other filmmakers.

--Donna Bowman

Act of Faith
- An interview with Robert Duvall about his film "The Apostle" from last week's NewCity